I'm yet to read the Knowledge but I don't see much about skills needed to kill other people. One thing I've noticed is that in any emergency that is large enough, people often turn on themselves; Katrina, Fires in stadiums etc (cause more death by crushing than the fire), financial crises (causes looting/murder), famine etc.

I agree with you that Civilization will contract. I am Australian and a soldier but my father was born in Normandy 2 kms from Omaha beach in the early 50's and my mother was born in Yugoslavia inside a Russian forced labour camp. I know what people are capable of doing to each other, when our civilization contracts, there will be alot of people who try to bring you down with them. How much of the book holds information on basic nomanculture/psychology of war/assassination techniques and combat theory?

Hi, no you're right - it doesn't broach the subject of killing, or wilderness survival skills. 'The Knowledge' is a popular science book that explores the underlying science and technology supporting our civilisation that we just take for granted today. There would of course be a period of turmoil and violence after a collapse of society and loss of law and order, and combat skills would be an advantage here, but sooner or later stability will be re-established and someone will have risen in control. The question is, what then? How do you start recovering society from scratch? Plenty of books have already been written on combat or survival skills, but I've never seen anything that takes an overarching view, over much longer timescales, of how you would actually go about rebuilding in a post-apocalyptic world.

I'd be very interested to hear your views and learn from your experience and expertise though. Would you be interested in writing a few hundred words about the psychology of survival and resilience, and I'll see if I can find a place on the website for it? lewis@lewisdartnell.com

I think you're right, there's no point adding to the thousands of books on warfare/killing already. Following the direction you've explained to have taken in your book, a more poignant question might be; Which parts of society SHOULD we recover? If I could rewrite this world it certainly wouldn't include our current finance industry.

From the perspective of medicine/economics I would want the world to be a combination of many more smaller communities; what we now deem nations would arguably be made up of loose "State" sized coalitions, consisting of millions of "tribes". International travel would be very limited and import/export would be largely prevented.

If I had to guess, the result of a world in this light would mean a more consistent state of conflict but with far less dangers. I'd draw the analogy to a world where people fight with sticks compared to a world armed with guns; I prefer sticks because you get hurt more often but you live to fight another day.

I agree with the above posts to a point, but the lesson of the native americans points to the need for the martial arts. The had far surpassed the Europeans in farming and politics, but their lack of military prowess caused the collapse of their civilizations and the loss of much their knowledge. The Chinese were even mentioned in the book, on their stagnation of development, but really only the stagnation of their military development were truly disasterous choices.Even ignoring the above points, I think the inclusion of hunting devices such as the spear, bow and fishing equipment should be included. Yes, all but the last were common war implements, but that does not diminish their contributions to the advancement of civilization.